The Best Fool-Proof Way to Roast a Chicken

Sometimes you wake up with a hankering for the comfort of a roast chicken dinner. You might dream about it from an office chair all day long. You’ll even stock up on the best ingredients at the grocery store. When that happens, ending up with dry, tough meat after an hour of roasting and thumb twiddling is a downright tragedy. Let’s never let that happen, shall we?

Roasting lean meats or fish in salt, like in our Salt-Crusted Chicken from the December issue, locks in moisture and insulates it from direct heat. To make a salt crust, knead together salt and egg whites in a ratio of roughly 3 1/2:1 by weight until the salt begins to dissolve. When the mixture resembles wet sand, pack it all around the meat. As it roasts, the crust will harden and form a seal as the salt crystals and proteins in the egg whites bond. Though the crust turns a deep golden brown, the best way to determine the chicken’s doneness is by pushing an instant-read thermometer into a thigh. Once the bird is cooked, let it rest for at least 10 minutes: All that locked-in moisture needs time to settle in the meat. Then crack the crust with the back of a knife, peel back the skin, and dig in! –Mary-Frances Heck